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Revealed: The Burglars Who Beat J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

It must have been incredibly difficult to pull off this raid on the FBI and never have your secret leak, least of all to the FBI and it’s then omnipotent boss J. Edgar Hoover. The New York Times profiles the gang who pulled it off:

The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is watching.

So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.

They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.

The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy tenure as director.

“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”

Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a book written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence…

” . . . a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups. . . ”

My G0d, if you can’t trust a shadowy covert quasi-military arm of the government, who can you trust?!!!

Liam_McGonagle

P.S. This is why we lost in Vietnam.

Mr Grim

“Shut up. We didn’t lose Vietnam. It was a tie!”

lausdteacher

We lost in vietnam and killed 2 million Vietnamese to boot. It was awful what we did.

Mr Grim

Err, my prev. post was a quote (hence the attendant quotation marks, but you may not have noticed them) from a movie, where it was said by a clearly foolish and deluded character to highlight the staggering ignorance of that particular statement…

InfvoCuernos

Good thing we don’t have to worry about the government spying on its people anymore!